E. B. White and Me

      Every struggling new writer who has just earned a B.A. in English or a M.F.A. in creative writing needs a dose of the career advice E. B. White once gave me. He had very definite views on how to write—what to write about—and how to get it in print.

           As a very junior twenty-year-old researcher/writer at the National Geographic Society, I had an L-shaped office nobody else wanted because it held two desks. A scratched and worn brown desk sat in the window-less foot of the L, while my desk sat in the larger, longer space near a window. Summer interns and guest writers often used that old desk.

           One of the first guest writers to share it arrived June 1, 1978. He carried a heavy manual typewriter into my office, dumped it on the desk and said, “Hi, thanks for sharing your office with me. Call me Andy.” After a day or two, I learned that since Andy really didn’t like his legal first name, Elwyn, he used his nickname “Andy” while the byline on all of his stories, articles, essays, poems and books listed him as E. B. White.

           I asked him, “Where did your nickname come from? Andy is not remotely like Elwyn.”

           “No, it’s not an alternate version of Elwyn. I earned a B.A. in English at Cornell University. In those days, any student with the last name White, was called Andy after one of Cornell’s founders, Andrew Dickson White.”

           One day we talked about deadline—looming ever closer—deadlines. He told me about his worst fear “…of staring at a blank sheet of paper with no words to fill it.”

           In his senior year at Cornell (1920-21), he worked as the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper published three times a week. Sitting at the brown desk, fifty-some years later, He bitterly complained, “It took me a few years working, reporting, and writing to fix that problem of starting to write when I didn’t have a clue what to write about.”

           “When I was a cub reporter for the Seattle Times, I got stuck. I sat there staring at the blank paper in my typewriter. My deadline passed. So, I went to Mr. Johns, the Times editor. What should I do when I can’t get started?”

           Mr. Johns told him, “Just say the words.”

           If the story had a happy ended, I doubt Andy would still be talking about it after so many years. Persistently late on turning in his work, Mr. Johns fired Andy some weeks later.

           After commiserating about our deadline fears, Andy White became my mentor. He persuaded me to match his work habit of writing 2,000 words every day—at least six days a week. He explained sometimes when the writing didn’t go well, after reading the draft, he would shove it into a desk drawer. Other times, when his words and ideas flowed easily, he’d keep writing until he completed his first draft. It went into a different drawer. After a day or two, using a sharpened blue pencil and his sharp editor’s skill, he would revise the good piece or pull the below-par article out of the other drawer and work hard to “Just say the words.”

           Among his writing projects were two “Around the Town” articles for The New Yorker magazine and revising and editing the book of grammar called The Elements of Style.

Becoming my mentor was also a project he took on. He found time every day to take his blue pencil to my latest 2,000-word piece. His priceless advice always included suggestions on which desk drawer to use to give my work what he called, “Breathing time, when you shift from writer to editor before working on another draft.”

Today, children may be the only readers who truly appreciate E.B. White for his excellent stories. His children’s books lived on past his death in 1985. Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan, are still very popular.

           Some college students probably know that E. B. White had a strong grasp on the rules of grammar and usage, but’s that all they know about him. In 1959, White took on a freelance project to revise William Strunk’s classic grammar guide, The Elements of Style. After that, the slim little book credited two authors and bore a nickname “Strunk and White.”

In 1978, I had the privilege of reading and copy editing some of his changes for the 1979 revision. That’s when he steered me away from taking a graduate degree in English or journalism.

           Students by the thousands applied to J-school in those days after the articles by two rookie reporters at The Washington Post, Woodward and Bernstein, resulting in President Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Andy claimed, “An over-abundance of college kids graduating with journalism majors will lead to a supply-and-demand problem with too many very average, untried journalists, and poor writers vying for too few jobs.

“Crack the mold,” he said. “You’ve got this. You already have a good job at the National Geographic Society. Keep it and keep writing about things that interest you. Don’t depend on someone else to tell you how to write, that just comes with practice not with more schooling.”

           A few days later, Andy inserted the following passage in his manuscript for The Elements of Style, 1979 edition. It’s addressed to every writer, but I’ve always believed he wrote it for me. I hear the echo of his voice giving me the same advice.

  “Many references have been made in this book to 'the reader,' who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.”

One day in late August, Andy’s wife called him with good news. In a few weeks the Pulitzer Award committee would announce that E.B. White won a Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He needed to wrap up his work in Washington and come home to New York to attend the awards ceremony.

Two days later, I put my friend Andy on the train to New York. He gave me two gifts. He left behind his old, clunky typewriter still sitting on the brown desk. His second and best gift was outlined in an encouraging message on the page still in the typewriter. “Continue writing, editing, and revising your pieces using the methods we used this summer. Remember to let the work breathe before you revise it. The same applies to all big life decisions like leaving the National Geographic or staying.”

I let my decision breathe, then decided not to enroll in a full-time M.F.A. writing program at college. Instead, I followed E.B. White’s advice and worked for the National Geographic Society for years.